I Just Read About That…

Sarah and I watched a bit of the third or fourth episode of this show when it aired on CBC.  But jumping into the middle of this show is difficult.  The characters are established pretty quickly, their quirks are all explained in the first episode, and it’s a bit hard to care about them without knowing their whole story.

So, when the show released on DVD, I decided to give the whole series a shot. And it has now given me a new favorite actor of the month: Sherry Miller who plays Mrs Jarlewski is just fantastic.  She’s like an older,  subtler version of perennial  favorite Portia de Rossi.

The show also introduced a cast of relative unknowns (who have all gone on to do more since then), and gave a wonderfully twisted role to former Growing Pains dad Alan Thicke (he’s an alcoholic, a philanderer and a wannabe (but not very good) actor).  And in a (presumably) unintentional nod to Growing Pains, his wife’s name is Carol, too.  

There’s also a wonderful role for the actor Raugi Yu who plays Chinese hit man Kam Fong (which I just learned is the real name of the actor who played Chin Ho on Hawaii 5-0).  When the series opens he is a fearsome hitman, but as the show progresses, and his sensitive side comes out, he quickly turns into a favorite character.

The first episode is quite faithful to the book: Ethan works at a Neotronic Arts, a gaming company soecializing in gore fuelled video games.  He works in JPod, a work area in the basement of the building that was staffed entirely by people whose last name started with the letter J (one of the final episodes goes into details about this).

Ethan’s brother is a successful real estate agent (and the real pride of the family).  And his mom is a suburban housewife who sells some of the best pot in Vancouver.  (The book was published in 2006, and was set in 2005, the year that Weeds debuted.  I wonder if this was a coincidence or not (of course Grow-Ops have been active in Vancouver for years, so I don’t think he got the idea from Weeds).

The show focuses primarily on life in J Pod: there are five programmers who work in the pod: Cowboy is a studly sex god who writes awesome code; Bree is a perfectionist and is awesome at motion capture; John Doe is a hacker extraordinaire (and a virgin); Ethan is a gore specialist; and Kaitlin is an American transfer from Apple.  She was basically dumped in JPod after a previous Jpodder died from inhaling too much helium.  And boy does she want out.

The writers (including Coupland on many episodes) have a lot of fun with the show.  Kaitlin dates a not-Ronald-McDonald clown from Churley Burger who is in character for several episodes.  John Doe is so named because he grew up on a lesbian commune and his real name is crow well mountain juniper.  He now wishes to be as statistically normal as possible.  The pod’s director is a maniac who wants to impress his son by inserting a turtle into the teams’ gore fueled skateboarding videogame.  And he also has an obscene crush on Ethan’s mom.

The show is surprisingly twisted, with people dying, people going missing and all of the gore gore gore that the Jpodders put into their game.  (Wonderfully animated on screen).  There’s also militant lesbians, drugs, a former Guantanamo detainee and a hugging machine.  No wonder it got canceled after one season.

The show definitely takes a few episodes to really fly (exposition is a pain, eh?) but once you get to know these weirdos, the show is quite fantastic.  The humor is spot on, the characters, despite all their flaws, are compelling, and the plots are really compelling.

Although many of the plot threads are resolved in the last episode (I assume they knew they were being canceled), the final scene is a cliffhanger, one that will sadly never be resolved.